Amid a phase of playing all five console games in the Super Smash Bros. series, my wife and I are going to start tracking our stats in the most detailed way possible.
While I’ve written about my individual love for the Super Smash Bros. series ad nauseum on this website, a big part of why I love the series so much is how much of a constant it’s been through different stages of my life.
From getting the original Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64 at the age of 5 in 2001 to thoroughly enjoying every game of the series today, Smash games have been there in my life through everything – elementary and high school, my first exposure to the competitive scene in college and COVID-19 lockdowns.
Though my wife and I collect video games together and currently have over 450 physical titles, we have long enjoyed the Super Smash Bros. series – likely owing to our relatively similar skill level across the five games and our individual histories of playing the different titles.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve descended into yet another fixation revolving around the series – and I do emphasize series, as most of my past fixations involving Smash have primarily revolved around Melee, my favorite title in the series and certainly the one with the most robust competitive scene and history.
Yet with owning all of the games in the series, it’s been incredibly fun to rotate through them on a nightly basis with my wife, looking to get more acquainted with the massive character roster the more recent games in the series offer while still spending plenty of time on Melee, the game both of us are the most familiar with in the series.
In our recent sessions of playing Smash games, I began to think about how we could quickly track our stats across all five games as we near the unlocking of the lone character in the series we don’t yet have access to – Wolf in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. When considering characters and stages throughout the series, Wolf in Brawl and five stages that were previously available as DLC for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U are the only things we’re missing.
Being just 15 matches in Brawl and a homebrew process away from having access to the entire series, I figured it would be a perfect time to begin tracking our performance against each other with every character in every game starting on an even playing field.
My initial thought was something quite simple – create a simple chart for each of the five games that would display our win-loss record when playing as each character – regardless of matchup or stage.
When expressing this extremely dorky idea to my wife, she felt like there was plenty more to do with the data, which would allow us to get much more information out of our performances against each other. How do we perform in specific character matchups on specific stages? Do I perform better against my wife in the Fox vs. Marth matchup when playing as Fox or Marth?
Thanks to my wife’s background and knowledge in computer science, we aim to maintain all of this information in an accessible way that helps us both keep track of these metrics for fun while also looking to find out more about how we play the games and how we can improve.
The result is a concise Google Form that I’ll fill out after each match, with that information automatically linked to a program built in Google Colab by my wife. From there, we’ll be able to dig deeper into our performances with each character across all matchups and stages.
We both feel like this will be particularly helpful when figuring out which characters we perform the best with, as well as which characters we’ve perhaps overlooked in certain matchups.
Here’s a look at how our current mains and secondaries shape out when we’re playing the five Smash titles:
Myself:
Smash 64 mains: Fox, Luigi
Secondaries: Mario, Kirby, Link, Captain Falcon
Melee main: Marth
Secondaries: Roy, Fox, Dr. Mario, Mario, Falco
Brawl mains: Marth, Toon Link
Secondaries: Mr. Game & Watch, Mario, Fox
SSB4 mains: Lucina, Roy, Marth
Secondaries: Mario, Cloud, Toon Link
Ultimate mains: Roy, Lucina, Sora
Secondaries: Marth, Corrin, Byleth, Pyra/Mythra, Hero, Joker
My wife:
Smash 64 main: Kirby
Secondaries: Link, Mario, Jigglypuff
Melee mains: Peach
Secondaries: Sheik, Dr. Mario
Brawl mains: Ice Climbers, Zero Suit Samus
Secondaries: Peach, Sheik, Meta Knight, R.O.B.
SSB4 mains: Lucina, Zero Suit Samus
Secondaries: Rosalina & Luma, Sheik, Peach, Cloud, Bayonetta, Dr. Mario
Ultimate mains: Joker, Peach, Daisy
Secondaries: Lucina, Zero Suit Samus, Sheik, Kazuya, Corrin, Pokemon Trainer, Dr. Mario
Of course, the sheer possibilities of it all are head-spinning, but also make this a tantalizing idea and project for both of us. Excluding the Mii Fighters of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that we do not use, there are a mind-boggling 12,103 possible matchups and 249 stages between the five games.
This accounts for dittos, or matches where both of us play the same character, as well as considering a single matchup as two separate matchups based on what character we’re playing (ie: My Fox vs. my wife’s Peach is a separate matchup from my Peach vs. my wife’s Fox).
As far as what the purpose of all this is – there really isn’t one outside of our own established love of data visualizations and our fixation on the series!
Neither of us are competitive players in any of the five games. While I follow the competitive Melee scene as a spectator and regularly play online, I’ve never entered a formal tournament and consider myself to be a very low-level competitive player at my absolute best, as I’m in the lowest echelon of rankings on Melee‘s netplay platform, Slippi.
I also can say that at least as of now, neither of us have much of a desire to compete. While I’d love to attend a supermajor to spectate and compete for fun in multiple Smash games, I don’t ever see my personal skill rising to a level beyond maybe being able to hold my own at a local tournament if I continued to play for a few years.
With that said, my wife and I greatly enjoy playing all five Smash titles with each other, and simply want to get better as a matter of having fun – no different than countless other frivolous hobbies one can hold in today’s uncertain and unstable world.
Beyond it serving from a distraction from the horrors of today’s world, it’s a reminder of the simpler things in life, and what it ultimately should all be about – just having a fun time with an ultimately inconsequential activity with people you love. If you sit there and think about it, most of your good memories can probably be summed up by that alone.
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